Palin-drone

So, tonight (4 September 2008) John McCain accepts the Republican Party’s nomination for President of the United States. But last night Sarah Palin accepted her anointing as the Vice-Presidential Candidate with a speech which I’m told was electrifying. I can’t say more: I would not think so little of my time as to spend it watching such static.

However, what I’ve heard from the news reports (which I would actually trust as two adders fanged) nauseates me. Here is a woman whose total experience in government reduces to a stint on the City Council, the mayoralty of a city of 6,500 citizens, and less than two years as the governor of Alaska. The mayor of my town, which boasts a population of almost 14,000, is a veritable figurehead. From her position as Governor of Alaska and mayor of some town, I wonder what interest she has paid to global issues, to global warming, and to the NATO alliance. Should she, through some travesty of Fate, become the Vice-President, my children will grow up in a world governed by an overwhelming incompetence compounded by ignorance.

Palin’s biggest claim to fame appears to be her role as ‘soccer mom.’ And I respond here to this claim: I find this argument both sexist, racist, classist, and . . . yes, stupid. My time as a soccer dad no more prepared me for my work as a teacher than her position as soccer mom prepared her for the Vice-Presidency of the United States. There is absolutely no relationship between the two positions: none whatsoever. Transporting children from school (or home, or the Mall) to the soccer field, and making certain that they have appropriate snacks and clean clothes (in case they slip in the mud!), and getting them home for dinner, hopefully to finish their homework, does not qualify anyone to be the Vice-President of the United States. There is nothing learned in the former which prepares for the latter.

Second, while this woman prepares to run on the issues of family values as a result of her role as soccer mom, she deflects the serious failure of parenting evidenced in the pregnancy of the seventeen year old daughter. Let’s be clear about this: while the soccer mom was transporting her soccer players to the soccer field, her daughter was engaged in pre-marital and unprotected sex. That activity resulted in pregnancy. Oh, these things happen all of the time, but the Republican majority has for years decried the abuses of welfare by unwed mothers. This particular unwed pregnant teen, well, because her mother is running for Vice-President, can, or must, get married. And there is family and economics to support the child--all three of them.

This election is turning into a nightmare from which I am afraid to awaken.